Thugs Still Reign In Taxachusetts

by Vin Suprynowicz

At
midday Wednesday, March 1, a 53-year-old Registered Nurse Anaesthetist
with the same name as actress Linda Hamilton — a grandmother who's been
licensed by the commonwealth to carry a handgun for the past 10 years
(fingerprints, FBI check, etc.) was headed eastbound on Route 2 through
the village of North Adams.

"At which point I noticed an
18-wheeler looming in my rearview mirror," Ms. Hamilton writes. "He
drove up to within 10 feet of my Blazer, and then lunged his truck at
my vehicle as if he was going to ram it. He pulled out as if to pass me
— we were on a two-lane road — and then pulled back in behind me. He
repeated this behavior four times.

"I was in fear
for my life. For over a quarter mile there is no place to pull over.
There were no other people around."

So, Hamilton
took out the snubnosed .38 Rossi she's licensed by the
state to carry. "I put it in my right hand and put my
hand back on the steering wheel. The truck driver immediately backed
off. I pulled in at the first place there were people and a pay phone.
I called the Shelburne State Police barracks and told them of the
incident, thinking, of course, that they could intercept the trucker
before he hurt someone.

"As soon as I mentioned
what I had done with my gun, I was put on the defensive by the officer
on the phone. Instead of thanking me for handling the situation in a
responsible way, which protected me and hurt no one, the issue suddenly
became the gun and only the gun, and not the fact that lives were in
jeopardy from an out-of-control trucker. The trooper said to me, 'You
should not have drawn your gun; a complaint could be filed.' "

The cops
know who the trucker was, but won't tell Linda Hamilton or her husband
Russ. Instead, a couple of lady troopers named Robertson and Curran
flagged Ms. Hamilton down, asked her permission to search her vehicle,
searched it anyway when she refused permission, found and seized her
legally licensed revolver.

Fortunately, Russ
Hamilton tells me Massachusetts (unlike many states) has no easily
misinterpreted law against "brandishing" a weapon. The Gun Owners
Action League referred the Hamiltons to attorney Robert Chesbro in
Williamstown. The Hamiltons plan to sue the state for assault and
battery (Mrs. Hamilton was frisked without evidence of any crime),
theft of her revolver (which the police still have) and concealing the
name of the truck driver who started the whole thing.

"I
put them on notice they were leaving me defenseless, and that I wanted
a police escort home," Mrs. Hamilton adds. "They refused." [See
more on the obligation of the police to protect anyone –
according to the law. – TYSK]

Taxachusetts,
of course, has so far abandoned the tradition of Lexington
and Concord (where Redcoat efforts to seize civilian arms
were not well received) that their welcoming billboards now read: "Have
A Gun, Go To Jail."

While Russ Hamilton says the
cops are dead wrong — "Under Massachusetts law you can keep a loaded
firearm in your vehicle if you're a licensed owner; you can have it
taped to the window if you so desire," he also admits: "We stopped one
mile short. We found a piece of land we liked, but it's one mile short
of Vermont. In Vermont there are no gun laws whatsoever, and it has the
lowest crime rate in the U.S. We kick ourselves in the butt that we
missed it by one mile."

Meantime, maybe the
Second Amendment isn't dead in courts, after all.

The
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — which overturned the original
"gun-free school zones" law — has announced it will hear oral arguments
this spring in the Emerson case.

Federal
Judge Sam Cummings of the Northern District of Texas last year
dismissed an indictment against Timothy Joe Emerson for possession of a
firearm while under a temporary restraining order routinely issued
during his divorce case. In doing so, Judge Cummings specifically
rejected the government's claim that the Second Amendment is some kind
of "collective" right pertaining only to the National Guard.

Judge Cummings' ruling refutes the bogus "collective rights"
theory, and demonstrates in detail why the individual-right
interpretation, significantly known as the "Standard Model" in the
academic literature and now embraced even by liberals like Harvard's
Laurence Tribe, is proper.

Specifically, Judge
Cummings ruled that the subordinate "militia" clause in no way negates
or limits the independent "right of the people" clause, and further
notes the U.S. Supreme Court has determined "the people" should be
interpreted similarly in the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth
amendments.

"This decision helps protect gun
owners from the ever-increasing classes of people prohibited from gun
ownership," comments Alan Gottlieb, head of the Second Amendment
Foundation. "Without a court willing to step in and put a halt to this
practice, eventually anyone with a parking or speeding ticket could be
prevented from gun ownership. This could be the pure Second Amendment
case that gun owners have been praying for over the past half-century."

Vin Suprynowicz is
assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His
new book, Send in the Waco Killers is available
at $24.95 postpaid from Mountain
Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; or by dialing
1-800-244-2224